Where Is Steve Jobs’s Magical Television?

The Apple TV part of today’s Apple event was a bit of a bummer. Some Apple watchers took the teaser on the invitation to the event—“We have something you really have to see”—to mean there would be a significant revelation in Apple’s plans for the future of television (get it: “see”?), which Steve Jobs, in the last months of his life, tantalizingly discussed with Walter Isaacson. (“I finally cracked it,” Isaacson’s biography quotes him as saying.) In a recent interview on a Brazilian talk show, Isaacson said that he did not put everything Jobs told him about his plans for Apple TV into the book, because “Apple hadn’t yet done it, and I felt that was maybe unfair to Apple before they produced the TV for me to be reporting what Steve thought it should be.” Isaacson is saving what Jobs told him for his next book, which will be a history of the digital revolution.

It is widely believed that the thing Jobs described to Isaacson will actually look like a television (except, of course, it will be a magic television). Supposedly, it’s being manufactured in South Korea, and will be released this year. However, there was no indication at today’s event that any of that is true. There is a new Apple TV, and Tim Cook spent a couple minutes on it, before moving on to the main event, the high-resolution iPad. The new Apple TV looks like the old Apple TV, but it can stream HD video, and the operating system has a whiff of iOS, the system that works on mobile devices. But there’s still no browser for navigating the Internet, which means you can only stream video from the handful of sites that Apple allows you to access (Netflix, YouTube, NBA League Pass, and Vimeo, among others.) The Apple-TV box is one of the company’s more intriguing-looking objects: a small black cube, like a square hockey puck, pleasantly weighty and solid feeling. But, as a product, Apple TV remains a mere “hobby,” as Jobs dismissively calls the device in Isaacson’s book.

The big news of the day in the future of TV was a Claire Atkinson piece in the New York Post that Google was looking to sell off Motorola’s set-top-box business, even before its 12.5 billion dollar purchase of Motorola Mobility is completed. The Post also reported that Cisco was looking to sell Scientific Atlanta, the other big name in set-top boxes. Google has big plans for the future of television, too, but it is focused more on software: Google TV would like to be the user interface for the coming union of Web and TV content. “Software is the value, not the hardware,” the Post article quotes a set-top-box executive as saying. By that standard, the Apple TV we saw today was just another set-top box.